Category: Marketing

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Marketing

Want to Learn How I Do Digital Marketing?

I love marketing, particularly digital marketing.

We built a great business on organic digital marketing using two essential tools: SEO content and email marketing.

In 2008, I launched iThemes and spent the next 11 years focused on publishing great content and pushing that out to our prospects and customers for our key marketing activities, which, frankly, many in our industry ignored.

The formula was so simple I think I need to make it into rocket science …

  • Focus on email marketing as the core marketing engine, specifically growing your email lists every day.
  • Put epic content behind your email subscription, things like ebooks, videos, or a free course, to grow those.
  • Create regular “free” content your prospects want, optimizing it to be found by the search engines.
  • Then send emails with that great to your existing customers and prospects.
  • Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse and repeat.

I know this works because I could have point you to a graph of our sales days over a decade and say …  see those peaks …. that’s when we sent an email to our prospects and customers.

But about five years ago, we started falling behind with SEO content. So I pinged my good friend and SEO expert, Rebecca Gill, to help us keep up and grow. She taught us her rock-solid, white hat process to do so and we started seeing the graph tick back up again.

As I exited my company last year, and Rebecca became a free agent again last summer, we started talking about how to help others in this system … particularly getting help and support to keep up and stay ahead … and most importantly offering a path to follow for their digital marketing.

That became a great partnership called Digital Marketing Kitchen.

Today I’m pumped to announce we’ve launched our inaugural premiere course aka the 8-Course Meal on SEO, content and email marketing sharing all of our processes and approaches. It’s the foundation and the essentials for how we do digital marketing, including Rebecca’s process.

Here are the main components of that course, which includes 43 lessons in total:

  1. Clarify You and Your Audience
  2. Define Your Digital Marketing Strategy
  3. Set Your SEO Strategy
  4. Create Killer Content
  5. Optimize Your Content for SEO
  6. Build Your Email List
  7. Create Emails That Convert
  8. Reporting and Monitoring

To add even more value … you also get my recipe for using content and emphasizing community in a course called Transform Lives with Content and Community. It’s about building not just a brand, but a community. And it’s a deep dive on my philosophy, a way of life, a mindset, an approach of doing business that breaks the traditional mold of business as usual.

We’ve also got Rebecca’s Quick Bite mini courses which are 12 additional trainings on everything from using Google Search Console to Mailchimp and more.

Then each month we’re doing live virtual events to help you get out of quick sand through our Office Hours, where you can ask questions live with us (the first one is this Wednesday!) … and live virtual Training … the first one on March 11 is titled 15 Steps to Launch and Rank Your Website in Six Months where Rebecca will walk us an actual case study showing you what she did, why she did, and provide actual traffic results.

We’re offering a special launch discount through March 20, 2020 of $50 off.

Click here to join the Digital Marketing Kitchen and use KITCHENOPEN by March 20 to redeem your discount.

I hope you’ll join us in the Kitchen to take the next steps in your digital marketing journey!

Categories
Marketing

Tips for Building a Podcast Following

I asked my friend and veteran podcaster Matt Medeiros for some tips on building an audience with podcasts recently.

It’s titled “The Essential Guide to Cultivating a Podcast and YouTube Following.”

Here is the audio only version:

You can listen in to the interview Matt did with me recently on his Matt Report podcast here.

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Marketing WordPress

The Key Missing Ingredient to Effective WordPress Websites

So many times in my own freelancing web design experience, I’ve found that I’d get a website done for a client, only to wait for content. And wait. And wait. And wait.

It’s a sad fact about most websites. They simply don’t have good content (or content at all) to properly market and sell their products and services. Their content does not get their site indexed and then ranked for that content in the search engines, which is essential to drive leads and sales for their businesses.

For many web designers, content is the biggest frustration. Their projects are completed, but left waiting on the client to provide the content.

From the client’s side, the website owner’s perspective, writing is tough.

Admit it: We all might think we can write the content about our business or organization, but when it comes down to it, we don’t have the time and energy, or perhaps even expertise to do it well. After all, if you’re a dentist, or a real estate agent, the expertise you might be paid well for isn’t writing web copy.

Getting a good WordPress website is the first step to growing your business online … but content is what drives the action, making that vehicle come alive and drive and grow business.

Content marketing is all the words, images, videos, etc that inform, educate and sell. And it’s absolutely essential for a good effective website.

That’s why I’m excited to share that my wife, Lindsey, an experienced entrepreneur, has started a content marketing business called Click Start Creative.

If you’re a web designer who wants a partner to help their clients with content, or a website owner stuck in neutral with content marketing, go check out Lindsey’s new business today. She can schedule a phone call to talk about your business and your goals and then translate that into an action plan to get your business growing online today.

As you might expect, I highly recommend her.

 

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Marketing Webinar Basics

My Best Practices For Using Webinars in Business

I have used webinars for several years now and I love them.  

I don’t like organizing in-person events because of all the logstics, people involved and cost. So whenever possible, we’ve scheduled webinars to showcase our products, do advanced training and offer practical content.

In fact, we built an entire training division using them. (At WebDesign.com we stream 15-20 hours of new content every month using webinars. And at iThemesTV, another 1 hour or so training a week.)

Along the way, we’ve picked up some best practices from just doing them week in and week out and seeing how others do them.

So I gathered these up and put them into a free ebook titled 15 Best Practices for Rockin’ Webinars. 

In this ebook, you’ll learn:

  • What is a webinar anyway
  • 6 benefits for using webinars in your business
  • How to make the most out of your webinars (and your attendees happy)
  • Recommended resources for webinars
  • How to record your webinar
  • 5 tips to remember during your webinar presentation and more
Download 15 Best Practices for Rockin’ Webinars here. 

 

 

 

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Marketing Webinar Basics

5 Tips to Think About While Presenting Your Webinar

We are all guilty of focusing on the pre-presentation process. Getting our topic, making our slides and then worrying about marketing and getting our webinar ready. BUT there are a few things to keep in mind when doing your presentation.

I have been sitting in many webinars lately, and it seems that no matter how prepared the presenters are they are forgetting some key components, so here are some quick tips:

  1. Speak loud. Don’t make your listeners adjust their volume. No attendee should have to stop the presentation to ask you to speak louder. So ensure that your audio is clear and loud and you’re speaking with voice.
  2. Go slowly. Do not run quickly through your slides. Some people are listening to you, others are reading, some are doing both. Make sure your attendees have ample time to see and read your slides. This also means if you’re showing something on your screen (like software overview) that you need to slow down how your mouse moves around the screen. Think slow motion mouse movements!
  3. Start on time. One thing your attendees will not forgive you for is being late. Even if it is 3 minutes. I sat through a webinar this week by a major company and they were 5 minutes late. Big mistake. My time like your audience’s time is money.
  4. Make time for Q&A. Make sure you leave ample time for questions and answers. If you have so much information then you need to make your webinar a two or three part series. Make sure your attendees have time to get their questions answered. After all, you have a captive audience.
  5. Show gratitude. Make sure you thank your attendees for taking time out of their day to listen to your presentation. There is nothing worse than a presenter for a webinar I am in to make me feel like I should be grateful they are taking time out of their day for me. It is the other way around.

Do not get too caught up in your preparation to forget these simple tips for your webinar. They may be small, but they are essential in hosting a successful webinar.